{ Mac Funamizu’s intelligent transparent looking glass. Curious how nutritious that apple is? Want to know what the cityscape in front of you looked like 30 years ago? Just slide the looking glass over to get the info you desire. | io9 | more }
{ Al Franken draws a map of the United States freehand from memory while answering questions about healthcare and other topics at a fundraiser for his Senate campaign at Capitol City Brewing Company, 14 Jul 2008. He later auctioned off the map. | KCIvey }
Can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.”
{ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859 }
A new analysis suggests that most socially dominant males contribute no more to the genetic pool than do their supposed inferiors.
“An individual really doesn’t have the opportunity to set up things so their genetic information pervades the gene pool a long time in the future,” says mathematician Joseph Watkins, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It could happen because life is chaotic.”
Theories on how genes flow through populations of organisms generally support this idea, which has been dubbed neutrality. But some anthropologists argue that cultural dominance can seal a man’s legacy. For instance, a rich and powerful father can ensure the status of his sons and grandsons.
“Evolution is an equal opportunity system. No single group is going to persist as the dominant group for very long before something changes,” says Michael Hammer, a co-author of the study.
Wars, climate change, and diseases have all sent dominant males careening off their pedestals, he says.
Father gives his 15 year old son “how to party right” lessons, the boy overdoses.
Man rescued from inside garbage truck.
Oregon State Police officers say people are filling up plastic bottles with urine and chucking them out the window, leaving them along the side of the road on Interstate 84.
14-year-old spotted what he thought was a bear, killed a woman.
‘Underwear Researcher’ told parents that he worked for Springfield Research, a fictitious company, and asked for assistance as part of a marketing survey.
“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.
Knights templar heirs have filed a lawsuit against the Pope calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros. They claim that when the order was dissolved by his predecessor Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties as well as countless pastures, mills and other commercial ventures belonging to the knights were appropriated by the church.
Quantum-”Uncollapse” Hypothesis verified.
A new chat system called Talkinator.
George Ledin teaches students how to write viruses, and it makes computer-security software firms sick. Unrelated: How to write a recipe.
Superbugs. The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat.
We have now moved beyond studies showing that mental training alters the structure and function of the brain to studies showing that it alters the structure and function of our genes.
Athletes and their smoking habits.
The evolution of the fight scene, from The Duke to Dark Night.
Hudson City banks the old-fashioned way: It takes deposits and makes mortgages to people who buy homes in which they plan to live. And then it hangs on to them. No subprime, no securitization.
Why did banks become so overexposed in the run-up to the credit crunch? Confessions of a risk manager.
Economists: Most stimulus went into savings.
By embracing small, lightweight cars with hyper-efficient engines, alternative fuels and hybrids we can cut our fuel consumption 30 to 50 percent by 2035.
By Monday morning, the search engine Cuil launched with great fanfare. By Monday afternoon, it had completely tanked.
Six rules doctors need to know.
Renting a DVD by mail is probably a greener choice than going to your local video store.
Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.
The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910.
Buffalo, NY ranks among the fastest-dying American cities.
Waterboarding an attraction at Coney Island amusement park.
Diaroogle helps you find quality NY public toilets from your mobile phone.
New subway escalators speed up when you get on.
JetBlue offers free trip to nowhere from JFK.
Scorpion brochettes, seahorses on skewers, iguana tails, dung beetles and silk worms on a stick, by way of fried sparrows, grilled snake and turkey vulture schnitzels, dog brain soup, dog liver with vegetables, donkey penis… Fast food Beijing style.
Yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too. Related: Girl with dog.
Corrections to last month’s letters to Penthouse forum.
Schopenhauer used to say that music tells you everything about life before you even experience it…
Readers not looking at the color palette will be caught off guard, misinterpreting the data.
So, the new shelton wet/dry is becoming a little repetitive. Same bizarre stories of weirdos, psychology revelations, cancer cures, American Apparel chicks… Repetition can be positive (Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence), even orgasmic, but usually it’s soporific.
Conclusion: I’m less inspired by working on the site. Conclusion of the conclusion: Starting today, I’ll stop publishing the nsw/d daily. I’ll post once a week, every Friday- the same kind of quoted moments, but by doing less of it, I hope I’ll keep it interesting and exciting for all of us.
Thank you, JC
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
photo { Neilsonnn }
Saudi Arabia’s religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women, an official said on Wednesday. (…)
Othman said that the commission has instructed its offices in the capital to tell pet shops “to stop selling cats and dogs”.
{ Rachel Chandler }
{ Gap store, Fifth Avenue, NYC }
Well, an explosion is a chemical reaction that causes an extremely rapid release of energy. This energy is released in several forms: sound, heat—visible as the “fire ball”—and shock waves, consisting of highly compressed particles of air propagating radially outward from the explosive source at supersonic velocities. Of these, it is the shock wave that is the primary cause of the structural damage. Released energy pushes the air particles out. In addition to going into the air, it also goes into the ground, and creates a crater. Some energy propagates through the soil as well, creating “ground shock” that can shake buildings, like a high-intensity, short-duration earthquake. The shock wave exerts extremely high pressures on all surfaces that it encounters in its path. The side of a building facing the explosion is worst hit by the shock wave because the wall breaks the wave and forces it to reverse its direction amplifying the peak pressure like ocean waves against a particularly weak wave breaker. The shock wave travels across and through the building, and in the process pressure is applied on all the surfaces it encounters. After the initial shock wave, a wind rushes in to fill the vacuum created, carrying high-velocity debris which can cause impact damage. (…)
The glass breaks almost immediately as the shock wave hits it. The exterior walls will bend inward and possibly also break. Once the blast wave has entered the interior of the building, it will flow both upward and downward and act on the floor slabs of the building. Since the floor slabs have not been designed for upward load, they are particularly vulnerable to collapsing in this direction. If the force of the explosion is capable of failing a floor slab or column on the lower floors, then a partial or complete collapse of the structure may be initiated as the floors above come tumbling down. This “domino effect” is known as “progressive collapse.” The vast majority of fatalities occur in the collapsed portion of the building.
The skin of the building is usually the most fragile part. These days, buildings tend to be very, very thin, almost all glass and aluminum. So the skins are very fragile and are crashed by the blast wave almost instantaneously as it enters the building. (…)
The State Department developed a set of new of criteria for architectural security, and that is how I started to get involved in this subject. I was working at the firm that developed those criteria. (…) One of the main criteria we asked for was a 100-foot setback from the road, because shock waves decay extremely rapidly with distance, and also that buildings be built of reinforced concrete, which is how bunkers are built. The windows were designed to keep all of the blast pressure out. They were very thick in order to be blast-resistant.
